Universal Field Theory of Leftism
Here follows a reprint of a column from 2014, which I thought pertinent to the tumults preoccupying current headlines.
To see how a whole people can fail to discriminate between police and criminals, to pull down statues of abolitionists, or wear the neck-cloths of African tribes notorious for being slavers, all in the name of fighting imaginary neonazism, or how people can call both for gun confiscation and, without a blush or stammer, for defunding the police, read on.
Universal Field Theory of Leftism
Do not be deceived: Leftism is an enigma. We need a theorem that explains not one or two aspects of Leftism, but all their traits.
The theory must explain, first, the honest decency of the modern liberals combined with their astonishing indifference, nay, hostility to facts, common sense, and evidence; second, it must explain their high self-esteem (or, to be blunt, their pathological narcissism) combined not merely with an utter lack of accomplishment, but with their utter devotion to destructiveness, a yearning to ruin everything they touch; third, it must explain their sanctimoniousness combined with their applause, praise, support, and tireless efforts to spread all perversions (especially sexual), moral decay, vulgarity, and every form of desecration; fourth, their pretense of intellectual superiority combined with their notorious mental fecklessness; fifth, it must explain both their violence and their pacifism; sixth, the theory must explain why they hate the very things they should love most; seventh, the theory must explain why they are incapable of comprehending an honest disagreement or any honorable foe.
And, while we are at it, if we could also explain why the Rich, who are routinely vilified by the Left number among its most ardent supporters, or the secular Jews, our theory would be very potent in its explanatory power.
There is such an explanation. I make no claim to have discovered this theory. It was discovered by Alan Bloom, back in the 1980’s, in his book THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, which he wrote to explain why the generation of the 1970’s was suddenly and remarkably stupider than any previous decade of his students.
The theory was popularized recently by Evan Sayet in his book KINDER GARDEN OF EDEN. Roots of this theory go back further yet: you will find an early articulation by C.S. Lewis in his seminal THE ABOLITION OF MAN, written a generation prior. And no doubt he learned his ideas from G.K. Chesterton in his ORTHODOXY, who wrote a generation prior again, and first diagnosed the error involved in Freethinkers (as they were called then) doubting one’s own ability to think.
Let us examine each one in order.
1. The Paradox of the Honest Liars
The Universal Field Theory of Leftism can be simply stated. It is a theory of epistemology. Epistemology is the theory of how man knows truth.
The Leftist theory of epistemology, simply stated, is that men cannot know truth.
(Now, any schoolboy can see the self contradiction involved: A statement that there is no truth, if true, is false. But we are not here to refute the theory, merely to explain what it is and why it must have the deleterious results it does.)
The theory holds that all we know is irredeemably distorted by our racial make-up, history, class interests, and psychological shortcomings; hence all knowledge is merely bigotry in disguise. To make a judgment between virtue and vice is vile bigotry in disguise; and to make a judgment that one society is better than another is vile racism in disguise. And bigotry or racism is a hate-crime. Discrimination is a hate-crime.
On the childlike emotional level of the vague and clumsy brain motions they use instead of thought, for the Leftist, a man making a discriminate judgment that homosexuality unfitted to the sexual character of man because it aims at a vain object is the same a Hitler discriminating against the Jews. To make a judgment of better and worse is the same as condoning mass murder. To judge the Israelis have a lawful right their land and the Palestinians have no right to use brutal and barbaric terrorism to retake it is the same as Hitler judging Gypsies to be inferior to Aryans, and lack all right to live. Discriminating between lawful civilization and brutal barbarism is like a Jim Crow law discriminating between Whites and Blacks.
In the lunatic wonderland of Leftism, no particular behavior, either of an individual or a community, leads to any particular result. In the lunatic wonderland of Leftism, there is no cause and effect.
Now, no doubt, dear reader, you know many a kind and decent person of Leftwing persuasion who do not match this description. They clearly believe in cause and effect, for they neither attempt to light a fire with rainwater, nor wash their hands in an incinerator.
What they do not believe in is any relation between human causes and human effects. They do not believe virtue leads to happiness or righteousness, nor that vice leads to unhappiness or condemnation.
If you say that chastity leads to happy marriage as cause leads to effect, the Modern Liberal will stare at you blankly. If you say paying unwed mothers to have bastards discourages wedlock, they will call you a racist. If you say applauding, defending and supporting the terrorist Palestinians against the innocent Israelis encourages terrorism, they will shriek like mad harpies. They think that to come to an unflattering judgment about any other man or race of men is not just rash and rude, they think it is evil, a type of bigotry, a hate crime.
They have taken a whole area of human thought, namely, everything embraced in ethics, politics, morals, economics and history, and declared it all sacred, off limits, and forbidden to be thought about.
In the memorable phrase of Sayet, they have defined reasoning as a hate crime.
By their theory, no fact and no conclusions of common sense are neutral. All are tainted by the original sin of bias and bigotry. The act of bringing up a fact is never, never an act done in the impersonal pursuit of truth. For them there is no truth, and even if there were, there is no impartiality. The act of bringing up a fact is always an act of aggression, an imposition, if not an attack.
This explains our first paradox. They are decent and honest people. Their motive for avoiding reason is compassion, because they wish not to be tempted by hate, bigotry, or thought crime. However, once reason is forbidden, facts, common sense, and evidence, likewise are as meaningless to them as to a Buddhist to whom all the world is illusion.
It is not that they cannot reason; it is that they follow a moral imperative against reasoning on certain forbidden topics. Anything outside those topics, their rational faculties function normally. Within those topics, their sanctimoniousness and high-mindedness requires them to refuse to listen to reason.
2. The Paradox of the Overweening Underachiever
Now, having turned their back on reason, evidence, facts and reality, the only thing they have to go on is emotion. And the one emotion necessary to their desire not to think is sanctimony. They must regard themselves as so high-minded and compassionate that even reality must give way.
A second factor immediately comes into play. This philosophy is corrupt and hypocritical to it core.
It is not based on lying, it is lying. It is the very essence of lying.
It is the art of filling one’s thoughts with symbols that have no relation to reality, and with words that make no sense and form no internally consistent statements. If human nature were utterly pliant and plastic, as their theory says human nature is, there would be no reaction nor retaliation from this gross self deception.
But human nature exacts a terrible and divine revenge. You bend human nature so far, and it snaps back.
By definition, you cannot indulge in self deception without being at once a deceiver and a victim of deception. Both the humiliation of being a chump and the guilt of being a con-man boils in the back of the mind.
Only one emotion is potent enough to smother this humiliation and guilt: pride. Humiliation and guilt lower the self esteem. Only pride raises it. The only source of pride immune from facts in the world is spiritual pride, the arrogance of a Pharisee who sneers at all other men as littler than himself, because and only because of his greater holiness, his lofty moral code, his spiritual greatness.
A man who claims to be a faster runner can be put to the race; a man who claims to be the greater poet can be asked to read his sonnet; but a man who claims only superiority in an invisible and imponderable spiritual realm can be put to no human test.
In short, because Leftism is the theory that truth is impossible, and reason is a hate-crime, it requires self deception. Because self deception provokes guilt and humiliation, the self esteem of the Leftist is continually uncertain. Because it is uncertain, it must be uplifted. The only emotion loud and broad enough to smother the powerful emotions of guilt and humiliation is the uplift of sanctimonious pride, pride in one’s own perfect righteousness.
Now, you may ask, if the Leftist is required by the dreadful psychological cost his perverted theory exacts to be righteous, why can he not perform real acts of righteousness? Why can he not help the poor and uplift the weak?
The answer is that some do. Far less than Christians, of course, but some make good attempts, and some make heroic attempts. However, these heroes of the Left are quite rare, simply because this is a case of the tail wagging the dog. The Christian does good works out of piety and obedience, and righteousness is granted him as a gift. The Leftist hypocrite plays at being righteous, and some playact desperately enough to actually try to be righteous, and do good things for the poor and downtrodden.
However, they are chained by the Unreality Principle. If they were truly motivated by a true desire to help the poor, they would look at facts and evidence, see what actually helped the poor and what actually harmed them, and they would select the helpful and avoid the harmful.
But instead what happens is that, since they live in a world without cause and effect, they are unwilling and unable to make any judgment about what actually harms and actually helps. Making such a judgment, remember, in their minds is bigotry, the one sin to be avoided at all costs.
Hence, they can only judge by good intentions. Results do not matter.
At this point, you may be wondering why, if they only judge by intentions and not by results, the Liberals are not sometimes helpful to those they wish to help? Surely raising the minimum wage sometimes produces a raise in real wages instead of producing more unemployment? At least once? Surely sometimes putting honey and water in the gas tank instead of petrol will create good gas mileage? At least once? Surely sometimes, by accident, they get it right? Even a stopped clock is right at least twice a day.
So the fact that they judge by intentions and not by results is not a satisfactory explanation. Why are they predictably, inevitably, and always wrong?
They are always wrong because their theory of morality springs out of their theory of epistemology. Their theory of epistemology is that there is no truth. Hence, their theory of morality is that there is no right and wrong.
If there is no right and wrong, there is no such thing as virtue and vice, no winning behaviors that lead to success and no losing behaviors that lead to loss. There is no consequences to any act. At most there are acceptable behaviors which gladden the hearts of your neighbors, and unacceptable behaviors, such as being judgmental (that is, using your evil reasoning powers to perform the evil hate-crime known as stating the obvious).
Try to put yourself, dear reader, into the shoes of these moral retards. In a world where there is no such thing as better and worse, wise and foolish, virtue and vice, efficient and inefficient, logically there can be no such thing as success and failure.
By your theory, all life is pure chance. Those men and races and nations who are successful are merely fortunate. The unsuccessful are merely unfortunate. (See Jarred Diamond’s GERMS, GUNS AND STEEL for a truly embarrassing display of this pathology on display. The reason for the success of the Europeans is due to the good luck of living along a wide band of temperate climate. Just luck.)
Let me use a metaphor from Sayet to explain: Imagine if your theory of life convinces you life is all purely random chance. Life is a spinning roulette wheel. Now you watch the wheel spin: and the number for the White races of Europe comes up not once or twice, but over and over and over again. After the Europeans win the game the first time, that might be random chance. After they win twenty-five centuries in a row, that seems crooked. If they win every game between the Peloponnesian War and the Cold War, that is clearly a plot.
Were you in such a game, you would not demand proof that the game was crooked: no proof is needed because no one wins every single spin of a true roulette wheel. There would be no discussion, and the winners would not be merely lucky, they would be crooks. The losers would demand, and rightly so, restitution of every penny.
Any loser who continued to think that the game was fair would be a fool whose blind gullibility is frustrating to the point of madness — such frustration is felt by the Marxist meeting the poor man who believes in private property, or the feminist meeting the woman who believes in marriage.
All rules by definition are crooked, part of a con game. Any attempt to excuse, explain or defend the rules is either misguided or malign.
The only success under crooked and malign rule is by definition a crooked and malign success. It is a successful crime.
Hence the Leftist must punish success.
This means not just monetary success but imponderable success. The Leftist must not only take money from the rich, he must take fame from the famous and glory from the glorious. Just as he must give money to the poor out of restitution for the crooked roulette wheel of life, so too he must give fame to the infamous and glory to the shameful.
All behaviors, no matter how obviously disgusting and wrongheaded and warped, no matter how unsuccessful by any measure, from the ancient Hindu practice of widow-burning to the modern Palestinian practice of suicide bombing, by this perverse Leftist logic must be granted honor and glory precisely because they are dishonorable.
Any behavior, from single motherhood to drunkenness to drug addiction, must be excused or even applauded, and can never be blamed for causing poverty. By definition, poverty is caused by the crookedness of life’s roulette wheel.
Not once or twice or some random percent of the time, but in every case and in one hundred percent of the time, driven by the inexorable logic of their theory, the Left must reward and laud the destructive and self destructive behaviors of the vice-ridden and barbaric and backward men within the nation, and the vice-ridden and barbaric and backward nations in the world.
Hence our second paradox is explained. The Leftist adopts his theory of multicultural morally-relativistic agnosticism toward good and evil out of an overweening sense of compassion; he must indulge in self deception to maintain this deliberate and perpetual blindness; his conscience must vex him. Such is the cost of believing life is random chance, without logic. Guilt is the emotion that judges oneself to be immoral or unworthy. Sanctimony is the emotion that judges oneself to be moral and worthy. The only emotion that hide and evades the guilt of the guilt-haunted is the sanctimony of the Pharisee. The sanctimony is neurotic because it is based on a rejection of reality. It is a deliberately false façade of a mind attempting to cheat itself.
At the same time the same theory of agnosticism toward good and evil requires, for the reasons given above, for the Leftist to conclude that all good and successful men and nations are outrageous cheats at a game of pure chance.
His sense of compassion and justice hence demands that he punish and discourage the good and virtuous and successful (and this includes success both material and imponderable) and reward and encourage, laud, praise and uplift the bad and vicious and unsuccessful.
His sense of compassion requires him, by this warped and twisted logic, to be perfectly and eternally merciless to the point of sadism toward the innocent, and his sense of justice requires him to be perfectly and eternally unjust. He is always wrong.
3. The Paradox of Sanctimonious Desecrator
Now I am not saying the Leftist theory cannot find problems and affix blame. He is merely forbidden by his theory from ever affixing blame correctly.
If life is a crooked wheel, the blame always rests on the crooks, on the Casino Owner, on the men who make the rules, on the establishment, on the institutions. Poverty is not caused by poor men not working hard, not caused by high taxes and foolish minimum wage laws, not caused by unwed motherhood and teen boys without fathers in their lives, not caused by rampant unchastity among the young women, drug abuse and drunkenness and gang violence among the young men; it is caused by the successful, the rich and powerful, the people who are imagined to run the system.
If the rich and powerful tilting the wheel of life is the only explanation for life’s miseries and sorrows and failures, they are always to blame for everything. Everything. These days, the rich men and rich nations are blamed for warm weather.
Here is the explanation of the third paradox: If life is a game of pure chance, then the winners of life, the happy people, the rich, the famous, the saintly, all of them must have somehow rigged or twisted the institutions, laws and customs, and all the rules of life to their own advantage. Since all property is theft, all property owners are thieves.
Hence, all life’s winners, heroes and captains of industry and saints and famous artists, everyone worthy of admiration for any reason, all of them, all the winners, the theory demands they be nothing but outrageous cheats.
Also, they must be outrageous liars for denying that they are cheats. Worse, they are all con men for deceiving their victims into playing.
The logic applies to wealth as well as to power and virtue, including such things as applause and glory and dignity. Hence, combined with the pathological and neurotic smug self-sanctimony, the Leftist, as long as he be true his theory, must demean whatever is worthy, true, successful, and good, and reward and praise whatever is unworthy, untrue, unsuccessful, and bad.
Let us call this the Principle of Inversion. The Principle of Inversion says that whatever or whoever Reason calls good and decent is in fact bad and wretched, and whatever Reason calls bad is in fact good.
This explains everything from the Leftist’s driving need to support the Jihadists who stand for everything the Left hates, to his driving need to demean George Washington, and other heroic men, and to demean everything else society admires; and it even explains why the Left is fascinated with vulgarity and ugliness in speech and in the fine arts. This is why the Leftists love four letter words.
In all things, physical and spiritual, concrete and abstract, they must uphold and laud the evil and denigrate and depress the good.
4. The Paradox of the Intellectual Ignoramus
It cannot escape the attention of any observer that the Left regard themselves as intellectuals. They use sesquipedalian polysyllabic words to express themselves, they assume an air of intellectual superiority, they deem themselves to have insights and compassion denied to the hoi polloi and the petit Bourgeoisie.
It may have escaped your attention, however, that these people are really, really, really stupid; I mean brain-breakingly stupid, too stupid to understand the law of cause and effect, too stupid to understand the causes of war, too stupid to understand the difference between men and women, too stupid to understand the law of supply and demand, too stupid to know the difference between the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, too stupid to know the basic rules of logic first established by Aristotle and worked out with painstaking thoroughness by medieval monks.
And yet these men achieve the highest academic degrees, and are elevated to the most prestigious positions on the bench, even to the Supreme Court, and they become teachers and professors and award-winning journalists, and the producers of all forms of art and entertainment. They not only predominate intellectual circles, they define it, so that the word ‘intellectual’ nowadays is a synonym for ‘ignoramus.’
How can this be?
The answer is threefold. The first part of the answer is that if life is a crooked wheel, all intellectual honors, awards, and degrees, judicial posts, and so on, are and should be rewarded to those least qualified to hold them, including oneself.
For the Leftist, issuing awards to the losers and barring awards from the winners is a matter of justice, a matter to which their noblest ideals and zeal must compel them; whereas to the rest of us, the minor injustice of not getting recognition is, at most, a pragmatic matter. The idealists are willing to fight to the last man with the last bullet in the last ditch, whereas the pragmatists quite pragmatically ceases to struggle as soon as the feared cost outweighs the hoped benefit. When a pragmatist fights an idealist, even when the idealist serves a sick and perverse ideal, the idealist eventually wins.
Also, like their sanctimonious superiority, which is never actually put to the test, intellectual superiority of a Leftist ignoramus is difficult to prove. Intellectual superiority can be proved in fields where there is a definite product, such as in mathematics and physics and engineering: hence these are precisely the fields that Leftists tend to avoid.
They flock to the humanities and soft sciences and arts, where matters are more subjective, sharp corners are padded, and no one is likely to judge them harshly.
And since the maxims of Political Correctness can be recited by a brain-dead monkey, all the intellectual need do is recite the maxims and slogans of the Political Correction Officers, and his fellow Political Correctoids will laud him as a genius. A journalist can be on the air for three days and win an award for excellence in journalism. The Nobel Peace Price can be awarded within the first week of a leader’s term of service in office.
The second part of the answer is that the theory of the Leftist is a theory that guides his life and gives meaning to it; he cannot and dare not question it, any more than a Christian deliberately tries to diminish or undermine his faith in Christ.
Now, if you take your car to a zealous Evangelical Christian mechanic, and he believes in the young-earth theory and you believe in Darwin’s theory, his disagreement on this theoretical matter has no bearing on his ability to fix your car. Likewise, Political Correctness applies only to certain topics, such as race, sex, sexual perversion, the superiority of Islam to Christianity, and so on. On any topic outside the bounds of Political Correctness, the Leftist allows his intellect to operate, and nothing prevents him from accomplishing works of genius in his particular field. Oppenheimer could be a world-famous physicist or Von Braun a leading rocket scientist without either of them being following right reason in politics.
The third part of the answer is that there is a simple ‘out’ or excuse which the Political Correctoid can use whenever anyone is so uncouth as to confront his intellectual accomplishments: it is the same excuse used by the evil tailors in the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ namely, that to criticize the worthlessness of any approved intellectual’s work-product merely proves that the critic is inexpressibly vile, foolish, stupid, incompetent, if not evil, loathsome, racist and leprous.
But the Emperor is actually naked.
This is why, among intellectuals, Nietzsche, who could not write a syllogism to save his life, is regarded as a philosopher, and ULYSSES by James Joyce regarded as a masterwork, and the inkblot smears of that fraud Picasso is regarded as artwork, rather than as simian trash.
The whole point of the fairy tale is that the Emperor and his ministers and the crowd decided not to make any independent judgment based on what their eyes were telling them. Instead they relied on what are called ‘social cues’. Social cues are the signs and symbols uses by a crowd or a community to transmit to its members the consensus of its decisions. It is sometimes called ‘Peer Pressure’ but in fact pressure is rarely used; much more often social cues are deliberately, even rigorously, sought out by folk eager to learn the consensus opinion and adopt and follow it.
An obvious (and benevolent) example is reading movie reviews: you cannot judge whether or not to watch a movie you have not seen on the merits of the movie, so you are wise to discover what the consensus of those who share your tastes might be. You trust them with the decision.
Social cues perform a generally useful function in coordinating group behavior. However, the Left has substituted social cues for all independent thinking on any topic touched by Political Correctness. The Leftists hence have an eerie and antlike uniformity of thought on issues as wide ranging as the proper legal forms of marriage and the science of climatology.
Here, the Left in our modern society has a pretty firm control of the ‘social cues’ determining who is smart and who is dumb. Smart is whatever agrees with the Party line of Political Correctness, hence someone without any notable accomplishments like Barack Obama is heralded as a genius of dazzling, nay, blinding brilliance; whereas Ronald Reagan, who engineered the downfall of the Soviet Union, was not merely dumb, but a drooling idiot and dangerous incompetent. It is to be noted in passing that no Leftist (and few on the Right) foresaw the downfall of the Soviet Union, but Reagan, Thatcher, and the Holy Father did.
As mentioned above, for them maintaining the world of illusion defined by social cues is a matter of paramount idealism, the source and summit of their compassion and sense of justice. For the normal people, the matter is a pragmatic question of whether the social cues are functioning properly; the normals treat it as one would treat the question of how to fix a faulty traffic light.
The essence of Political Correctness is substituting conformity to social cues for independent thought.
Since the social cues are guided by a philosophy, described above, which always holds losers for winners, vice for virtue, and folly for wisdom, the social cues are always, without exception, pointed in the wrong direction, and giving only false information to those that follow them.
Hence, the Leftist, no matter how intelligent he may be on other areas, in order to avoid the hate-crime of reason, follows the social cues in the direction of unreason, and says and believes the most obvious blithering idiotic nonsense imaginable, and at the same time thinks himself a genius.
The Leftist, no matter how intelligent he is naturally, must unnaturally make himself stupid to fulfill the demands of his theory.
He is not stupid because he lacks the capacity for intelligence; he is stupid because he deliberately refuses to use that capacity.
He is both perpetrator and victim of self-lobotomy.
5. The Paradox of the Pacifist Terrorist
It should be obvious at this point that the Leftist theory is designed to fail.
Its epistemology is pure self-refuting gobbledygook, its morality is an abominable mass of foetid and bubbling evil incarnate, its pretensions to superiority laughable were they not dangerously psychotic. It substitutes an iron straitjacket of conformity for any independent thought.
(The irony of the fact that they regard themselves as independent thinkers is stunning. But this is one more example of using social cues instead of thought. They think themselves independent because the herd cues tell them they are.)
The theory must fail each time it is put in practice. How can anyone continue to be a Leftist for a week, much less for a lifetime?
The answer, allow me to remind the patient reader, grows out of their theory. Again, their theory of knowledge is that there is no knowledge, no truth, only bigoted opinion. The only way to avoid bigotry is to avoid judgment and the use of reason. Avoiding reason necessitates a theory of morality that denies cause and effect. No vice causes loss, no virtue causes happiness. Hence life is a random roulette wheel. If there are no vices and virtues, not even the intellectual virtues of honest thinking, then no independent thought is desired or permitted. Instead, all thoughts are determined by social cues. Thought is collective.
Again, the only way to explain the inequality of outcomes upon the spinning of life’s wheel of fortune is to assume that the wheel is fixed, rigged, and crooked. The only way to explain that the wheel of life is rigged is to indulge in a conspiracy theory belief that someone, whoever seems to be life’s winners are (the capitalists, the Caucasians, the males, the straights, the Jews) are conspirators who rigged the game. The Leftist theory of morality says that good must be punished and evil rewarded. This applies both to material wealth and imponderables such as fame and dignity.
Hence, the Leftist theory of Politics and Economics must spring out of this theory of ethics in only one way. Since all of life’s woes are caused by the evil conspiracy of institutions which rigged the game, anything which changes the outcomes of the game is good, and anything that preserves the rigged game is bad.
Now, by the very nature of their theory, the Liberal scoffs at the idea of a true wheel and a fair game. By definition there is no fair game. There is only a Darwinian competition between remorseless adversaries between whom no peace is possible nor desirable. The game is either rigged in favor of the diabolic evil winners (the capitalists, the Caucasians, the males, the straights, the Jews) or rigged in favor of the angelic losers (the workingman, the Blacks, the females, the sodomites, the Mohammedans, the Aryans).
Hence the Leftist theory of economics is, briefly put, to rob the rich and give to the poor. The fact that this discourages thrift and hard work and honest dealing and the other behaviors leading to wealth creation and capital accumulation and encourages the behaviors which lead to poverty is a fact the Leftist mind never addresses. Their theory does not say how to answer this one way or the other, so they simply block the question or blot it out of their minds, as if no one had asked it. Nonetheless, wealth redistribution discourages wealth creation and leads to capital decumulation.
The Leftist theory of economics produces poverty.
This is the precise and diametric opposite of the prediction made by the theory. A more fair and even distribution of the winning numbers of life’s spinning wheel should have produced more wealth for everyone. The super-genius five-year central economical planning of the Soviet Union should have outproduced the gross inefficiencies of unplanned capitalists America by an order of magnitude. Instead the Soviets ended up eating each others’ heads in starvation, and the Americans grew overweight. The theory not only failed, it failed in a remarkable, spectacular, astounding, astronomical way.
The same result obtains for the application of their theory wherever it is applied.
The Welfare State should not have abolished the family structure among inner city blacks and, even if it did, the loss of the family should not have malign side effects on child rearing.
Turning all the inmates of insane asylums loose on the streets for some reason not named should not have lead to an increase of the number of insane street people. Being lenient on criminals should not produce an increase in violent crime. Disarming the victims should not encourage attackers. Surrendering a war should produce victory, not defeat. Rewarding Jihadist violence by praising and funding them should decrease Jihadist violence. Socializing the student loan industry will lower costs. Socializing the medical insurance industry will not only allow you to keep your plan and your doctor, your premiums will actually go down. And more people, rather then fewer, will be covered by health care the moment less health care is available to them. Goods can be rationed without rationing. And so on and so on and so on.
In each case, the theory fails in the most remarkable and jaw-droppingly spectacular fashion possible.
The Leftist has only two choices here: accept reality, in which case he is no longer a Leftist, or deny reality, in which case his loyalty to the ideals of Leftism becomes rarefied and refined, and he becomes one of their Cathari, the Pure Ones, an arhat of enlightenment.
I spoke above of the Unreality Principle. Here is where it comes into play. The Unreality Principle is the moral imperative to ignore and deny reality at all costs, and remain loyal and faithful to the consensus-made make-believe illusion-choked funhouse-mirror Wonderland of Liberal Bullshit. You must bathe in the bullshit, eat the bullshit, drink the bullshit, and stuff the bullshit up your nose as far as far can be, because from now own the offal will be feast and wine to you, and will be your baptism and your oxygen. It will feed and sustain you.
However, the Unreality Principle demands a cost. First, there is something like a daily maintenance cost: you must attend closely to whatever the social cues are telling you, and believe them and not your lying eyes. The needle to perform this particular lobotomy is called the Mass Media.
Thanks to the Mass Media, you can live in the richest nation in the history of forever, and believe that poverty is overwhelming. You can live in the least imperial nation of all time, and denounce it daily as imperialist. You can live in the one nation, out of all of infinity, which grants the best opportunities and bends over backwards to offer education and jobs to women, blacks, Jews, and immigrants of all colors and backgrounds, and denounce it as systematically racist. You can live in the nation where there are fewer Fascist White Supremacists than there are members of the Flat Earth Society, and yet believe that the brain of Hitler kept alive in a jar in Brazil is about to give the order for a sudden Aryan insurrection, and the blacks will be strung up from lampposts as far as the eye can see tomorrow. Meanwhile the real fascists who are really committing real atrocities, and are indeed leaving corpses as far as the eye can see, the social cues tell you that these are kindly people devout to the Religion of Peace provoked by the evil Jews, who only want to fly kites under the benevolent and avuncular leadership of Saddam.
I say again, all these beliefs are not only false, they are the diametric opposite of truth. Maintaining the system of social cues and self-hypnosis necessary to believe and eat and inhale all this pure manure requires an immense effort. What happens when a trace of reality creeps in?
What happens when the theory fails, but the option to abandon the theory is not examined?
Simple: the theory holds that the theory cannot fail. If life does not cooperate with the theory, life is wrong, not the theory. Remember the basis of Leftist moral theory, that the wheel of life is crooked, and the game is rigged by evil conspirators. So when the game of life gives the wrong answers, what else? Blame the conspiracy. Who else? Blame the Jews.
At some point, their frustration with their own stupid theories and their spectacular failures expands until it explodes into wrath. Often this is when reality begins pressing in on the hermetically sealed bubble of social-cue-protected dreamland in which they live.
The Occupy Wall Street movement was in part a reaction to the painful reality pressing in on the Leftists that their masters had betrayed them: the beloved masters in Washington made a deal with Wall Street, to establish a state-syndicate alliance in one field of the economy after another, from the Motor Car industry to the Student Loan industry, and the Occupiers dimly felt this. Small investors were having their 401K’s wiped out while CEO’s were getting more in bonuses than a workingman makes in ten years. The Occupiers knew the same thing that the Tea Party movement knew, namely, that the rich had ganged up with the powerful to trample the faces of the poor. Being rightwing, the Tea Party marched on the powerful in Washington, and were peaceful. Being leftwing, the Occupiers marched on the rich in Wall Street, and were violent. (And the Press, being Leftwing, reported not just untruth but the exactly opposite of the truth in both cases.)
But violence is not ever far from the mind or hand of the Left. Their theory is that life is unfair, a crooked wheel, a conspiracy of hate, and oppression. They live in a goofy paranoid world where every institution is a sinister con-game meant to lull the victims into the abattoir: if such a world were real, violent revolution would be the only answer. They cannot seek justice, not if justice is merely the will of the stronger. They cannot appeal to reason, since reason is the first thing they abandoned.
And yet, why do the Leftists so admire, nay, idolize figures like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, who used only nonviolent means to promote their goals? Pacifism is not in innate part of the theory; it is merely an ornament, like vegetarianism, with which they adorn themselves, as a maiden might put a flower in her hair, to flatter themselves. It is one more excuse for moral preening. It has no relation to their lust for bloodshed or their admiration for figures like Mao and Che and Saddam, and all the brutal killers of the world.
Because reason is outlawed, they are not consistent and feel no need to be consistent, and no shame at being hypocrites. The Left are only pacifist when it comes to rightful and lawful uses of violence, such as American wars fought in defense of peace and civilization, or the lawful use of force by policemen to maintain civilization. The Left are only pacifistic regarding good and lawful uses of force. Then they mourn, and put flowers in gunbarrels.
When the use of force is unjustified, evil, aggressive, barbaric, horrific, and directed against the innocent, the Left applauds and lauds it, as when criminals kill policemen, or Jihadists kill Jewish schoolchildren, or Mao kills uncounted myriads. Then they celebrate, and bathe in blood.
They do not reconcile their floral pacifism with their bloodthirsty love of violence. They simply like both. Logic is not their strong suit.
6. The Paradox of Hating the Beloved
You may ask, when their theories fail and fail spectacularly, how is it that the Leftist does not react to reality and jettison the theory? Why is it they do not wake up?
The answer is that Liberals never wake up. Never. The whole point of Liberal theory from start to finish is to form earplugs to smother the ringing of that alarm clock called reality.
You may ask, why do they not want to wake up? Don’t they crave at least some reality in their lives?
The answer is that you are thinking of them as a person of sound mind who believes a theory, the way a calm and purely logical astronomer might believe the theory of the Big Bang as opposed to the theory of the Steady State, based on the evidence. But the astronomer is impartial. He will not lose his wife and friends and self respect if he discovers the stars came from a different origin than he thought. Whether or not the procession of Mercury demonstrates that the Sun’s gravity warps timespace has no effect on whether the astronomer orders anchovies on his pizza. It is not part of his life.
Dear reader, I myself in this essay helped to foster this false impression that the Leftist cult belief and their delirious vision is a theory by calling it ‘a theory.’
I lied. It is not a theory.
It is crack cocaine.
The Leftists are people who abandon their innate intelligence and moral stature and who deliberately make themselves to be more stupid than average, less moral and upright and decent than average, who at once combine the worst features of a self-deceived fool and a self-deceiving conniving con-man. The only thing that saves them from the constant pain of the dentist drill of their conscience, the constant clamor of their wretched self-esteem telling them that they do not deserve to live, the only thing, indeed, keeping them alive, is their false and inflated sense of sanctimony.
Each one is a Judas, who has betrayed all he holds dear. The only reason why he does not hang himself from the nearest redbud tree is because he adopts the numbing hypocrisy of the Pharisee.
There is no greater high than to fly on the drug of smug moral superiority. You may look down your nose at all fashion of men greater than you in every other way, but if they are evil and you are righteous, the savory odor of your righteousness in your own nostrils is finer than myrrh. It is more than wine which mortals drink; it is nectar of the gods.
One thing that free men never understand about slaves to addiction is that the slave is a slave. The slave is commanded to find his next hit, his next high, and nothing is allowed to stand in the way. Nothing. Not self respect, not the law, not the fear of god nor man.
The slave will beg, borrow, pawn, to get money for the next dose; he will sell his furniture, rob his friends, steal from his wife’s purse, sell his clothing, sell his soul, and do anything, anything, no matter how degrading. The master is his addiction, his craving. The master has the whip hand, and the whip is a whip of scorpions.
And they turn violent if you stand between them and their next hit.
Anyone diminishing the self-righteousness of this crew of evil lunatics is met with the fury of evil lunacy, not because they are evil and not because they are lunatics. They are good people commanded by their evil master to do evil deeds. They are sane people commanded by their lunatic master to say lunatic things. Their master is this addiction to a false sense of self-righteousness.
If they actually were righteous folk, men who had done some brave deed or made some deep sacrifice in the cause of goodness and light, there would be no hostility, no addiction, no violence. But the golden apple they took from the Hesperides of Righteousness is an apple to which they have no right. It is stolen. Their self-esteem and self-righteousness and sanctimony are all counterfeit. The one truth they can never admit is that they have no right to think well of themselves.
That is why the truth is their enemy. That is why they are in rebellion against reality.
Do you think you can talk a crackhead out of his addiction? Do you think you can talk a slave out of his chains?
Anything that reminds them of innocence or truth is abhorrent to them. It makes them uneasy, lest their master raise his whip of iron and punish them. Therefore the very people and things the addicts of self righteousness hate the most are saints, women like Mother Theresa, and heroes, figures like George Washington, and captains of industry, men like Henry Ford.
The things they hate most are ideals like Justice and Mercy.
And they despise and hate the innocent most of all: the greatest part of their fury and destructiveness is turned against those two figures which, for all times past, were the symbols and embodiments of purity and innocence: the virgin and the child.
If the reader doubts that Leftist hate virgins, let him inspect any dozen Hollywood movies taken at random, or visit any dozen college campus dorms at random after hours, or read any two dozen essays by feminists. If the reader doubt that the Left hates children, let him read the account of what goes on in an abortion mill, or read how the British Health Service disposes of the tiny corpses.
7. The Paradox of Dishonorable Opposition.
The seventh and final paradox is explained by this: In an effort to reduce the hatreds and tensions of the world, the Leftist theory concludes that the cause of hatred and tension is rational thought on human topics, and so rational thought on human topics is outlawed. When you hear them uttering words of unreason, you think they are mistaken, or fools, or subject to a brain disease, and you are perhaps prone to dismiss them with a shudder of wonder. But when they hear you uttering words of reason, they think you are indulging in a hate-crime, pure bigotry. Bigotry is the root of racism, homophobia, sexism, and Islamophobia.
They think you are filled with hate and seeking genocide, and they are shocked you have no conscience. They hate you. They hate all innocent and rational people. What else can they do?
8. The Paradoxes of the Wealthy Socialist and the Antisemitic Jew.
While it is not one of the main paradoxes addressed above, one must be curious why so many of the Left seem to have joined a movement with a worldview that is innately hostile to what appears to be their self-interests.
But recall what the Unified Field Theory of Leftism predicts: From the roots of the compassionate epistemology, which forbids them from holding any opinion based on judgment, we have seen how this flowers into to the judgments all opponents are evil, all lovely things hateful, no war is just, no independence of thought is to be tolerated, no success to go unpunished, and no truth to be admitted.
To whom would this naturally appeal? What sort of man wants the laurels due to an intelligent man, without doing the work of actually using his intellect? What sort wants the palm leaf due an honest man, without shouldering the burden of honesty? What sort wants the ovations due a hero, without the danger or bloodshed of heroism? Who wants other people’s wealth, but not for himself, nor, apparently, for anyone, merely wasted in a vast display of public pomp?
And why are they so angry? Why so vehement? Why so arrogant? Why do they always attack the person, and never the argument, during any disagreement?
It is because they are respecters of person, and that is all they are.
Christianity, Capitalism, and Democracy are all innately egalitarian. While Emperors and Kings exist comfortably in Christendom, dictators, tyrants, and Oriental potentates with absolute powers unbound by any law, and Brahmin, held to be superior spiritually, not just temporally, do not.
In a free market, a car salesman is worth what his customers pay him, but his right to property is the same as that of a famous and insightful novelist, who is paid much less. In a democracy you do not get an extra vote merely because you are smart. Christianity, Capitalism, and Democracy are all innately no respecters of person.
Recall the description of unearned pride as the addictive drug of this type of psychology. Now, pride exists in all of us, but overweening pride exists mostly in men of some accomplishment, real or imagined: such as inheriting vast wealth; such as being a member of a highly bookish and intelligent Chosen People whose myriad accomplishments, even when dispossessed of their homeland, have no parallel; such as earning a degree in an elite university; such as having artistic or spiritual insights, or the gift of gab, which allowed one to enter the Chattering Classes, and earn one’s daily bread merely by words and wits — some accomplishment, that is, which in their estimation has not been recognized nor rewarded as due.
But what is the one thing the Rich, the Chosen, or the Elite, blessed by so much, cannot get for love or money in a Christian Commonwealth, in a Free Market, or by vote in a Democracy?
They cannot get rank. They cannot get the imponderable pomp and honor and deference due to men of noble or high station paid to them by the lesser and inferior ranks.
For it is not just wealth, or race, or intellect that makes a man into the shriveled and whining destroyers I have here so tellingly described. It is a high disdain and a sense of injured merit.
It is a sense of being cheated.
You heard me. These pampered and privileged members of the elite feel that they are being robbed of their just due. Being elite is not enough. They want the lesser beings, the common men, the mob, the peasants, the underlings, to give them the honor and worship and adoration normally paid to a true and ruling aristocracy.
These people hate America, and everything for which she stands, and hate Christ, and everything for which He stands, with the bitter hatred of someone who has earned a high position and been cheated of it. Democracy does not give them what they want. God does not give them what they want.
Look at what Leftist political theory did in Russia and Red China once it was freed of all lingering doubts and checks and chains. Look at the piles of skulls. Then look at the Dachas and the larger-than-life monuments to the Beloved Leader.
They want to be aristocrats, in spirit if not in fact. They want to be born into privilege, and to be admired, without the tedium of actually doing anything to earn admiration, neither in the marketplace of the market, nor in the marketplace of ideas.
There is no paradox at all of rich man being committed to policies that will destroy the laws and customs needed to create wealth. The Middle Class creates most of the wealth, most of the jobs. Socialism requires cooperation between certain protected industries to be kept alive as neutered pets. Whether the rich bribe the powerful or the powerful extort wealth from the rich makes no matter: the end result is a partnership between the rich and powerful to trample the faces of the poor. That is the end result of the mindset described above, once it is free to act, and devoid of scruples. Imagine a boot stomping a human face forever.
Any proud man who feels the society has not given him his due will gradually grow more critical and impatient with it. Remember the hatred poured out upon the Middle Class, and our religion, and our morals, and our work ethic. Remember how we are accused, and accused, and accused of the very things we and we alone, across the ages, have cured or corrected or minimized, everything from pollution to racism to population outnumbering resources.
The reward of wealth is not enough for the rich socialist; the reward of freedom from racism not enough for the Jew who supports Palestinian bombers and hates the state of Israel; the reward of sinecure is not enough for the Ivory Tower professor. They see men who are self-reliant and happy and God-fearing who do not bow the knee to men who possess more, physical or intellectual possessions, than do they. They do not fear and love their superiors. That the ordinary working man, a father with a family, should be happy in his suburban home, and pay no honors and make no obeisance to the would-be elite in our elite-free society is intolerable to them.
They do not want our money. If they wanted money, they would not spend countless billions on boondoggles or flush it down ratholes. They do not want to rule us. If they wanted to rule, they would not be so absurdly incompetent when in power.
They want only to have the honors, like Princesses, not the duties of war and lawmaking, like Kings. In the final reckoning, when all is said and done, all these paradoxes can be explained by the simplest theory of all.
Leftism is the sin of pride disguised as compassion.
9. What is to be Done?
The lunatics are busily destroying everything they touch, from the fine arts to the international balance of power. What is to be done?
The secular rightwing must find its own advice from its own sages. I can offer to my fellow Christians only the reminder of our marching orders from our Master. We return love for their hate, we pray for their cure, and we know Christ, with the lightest touch of His pierced hand, can throw demons possessing a poor soul into the swine that leap from a cliff into the deep. How much easier to touch a man possessed of what is fundamentally a weak, silly, and self-refuting philosophy?
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
